Instead

Instead is a series of collages I made during the strict confinement phase in Barcelona. Ten of those will shortly be published in the journal Thesis Eleven. Here are a few examples.

When strict confinement was announced where I live, I was just about finishing a text on my uncle who died in Tasmania in 1956 as a young immigrant from Northern Greece. Due to the utter silence surrounding that death in my family, the text had been hard to write; in a certain sense, the radical change of the social situation around me was welcome as it forebode the end of that writing. Soon, however, I found words were failing me altogether and it didn’t feel like a relief. This was the case not only with my words but also with those words of others I had access to online. I found them meaningless, pompous and worn out.

Instead, images and dreams took on an increasingly insistent presence in my mind. After a time of taping dreams whose surface was re-written in order to make them publishable, I started making collages with images cut out of the Sunday supplement of the newspaper I usually read, and which I continued to buy in paper despite the lockdown: I kept to the rule that I should only use that material. The images that most struck me had to do with deserted cities and the purported return of animals, and with the hospitals’ staff performance of their tasks.

In Thesis Eleven, I shall present ten collages of a series of fourty, which deal with these two main themes metaphorically i.e. displacing people, animals, things from their context. I found that such a move shed some light onto the emotions the situation brought forth but also onto the absurdity of some discourses, such as the omnipresent language of war and the amazed discovery that the vast majority of underpaid care workers are women.

Here are a couple more:

and a last one from a new, ongoing series:

the strelitzias from James Ellroy’s shirt instead of the helicopters in this ad